Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

Government may go on diet
Legislators want to consolidate services
Monday, April 7, 2008 3:08 AM

By Jim Siegel

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

If you ever had the feeling that governments in Ohio constantly have their hands in your pockets, maybe it's because there are 3,900 of them looking to tax you.
In addition to the state, which taxes your income and purchases, Ohio has 1,308 townships, 939 cities and villages, 663 school districts, 88 counties and about 900 other taxing districts that include such entities as libraries and port authorities.
A pair of state lawmakers from Franklin County say the situation has grown to ridiculous proportions, forcing Ohioans to shoulder unfair tax burdens to support an inefficient and duplicative system of local services.

''There are probably places you could do away with townships and small villages,'' said Rep. Larry Flowers, R-Canal Winchester. ''I strongly believe there are too many school districts, fire departments and street departments. We need to create new collaborative efforts.

''Local government, it's your turn to see what you can do differently.''
Flowers, a former township fire chief, and Rep. Larry Wolpert, R-Hilliard, are jointly sponsoring legislation that would create a commission to recommend ways for all local taxing entities to slim down and consolidate.

''We're not really going to turn this economy around until we really reduce the cost of these local governments,'' Wolpert said. ''We're permitting this commission to have a lot of latitude. Why do we need nearly 20,000 elected officials in Ohio?''

The lawmakers hope to model the commission's final report after one completed by Indiana officials in December. In a 46-page document subtitled ''We've got to stop governing like this,'' the Indiana Commission on Government Reform spelled out 27 ways that local entities could get more efficient.

Among the suggestions: transfer all township oversight to county executives; eliminate elected county treasurers, auditors and sheriffs, transferring responsibility to a county executive; and require each school district to have a minimum of 2,000 students.
''No one has faulted the report,'' said John L. Krauss, the commission's executive director and director of the Indiana University Center for Urban Policy. ''The only folks opposed to the report are the current officeholders.''

Wolpert is under no illusion about the difficulty of not only putting the commission in place but also implementing its suggestions.

By Double taxed

About time continued

''There are a lot of land mines anytime you look at upsetting just a few of the 19,000 elected officials in Ohio,'' he said, pointing to his recent struggle to pass a bill banning mayor's courts.

The Ohio Township Association has already called asking that they be included on the commission. ''I would prefer to have more of an academic type of approach,'' Wolpert said.

Franklin County has 18 townships, including a number that are little more than patches of unincorporated islands surrounded by Columbus and other cities. Flowers pointed to struggling Clinton Township in the north-central part of the county as a prime target for elimination.

But Michael H. Cochran doesn't expect much savings from consolidating townships. The executive director of the Ohio Township Association said that while a few townships need cleaned up, ''townships are now providing the very type of government that people at the local level want.''

The academics that could be placed on the commission, Cochran said, ''have almost no concept of the actual workings of the ways townships, counties, villages and cities co-exist. That scares me.''

Small Ohio school districts also could be targeted. About 150 of the state's 614 nonvocational districts has fewer than 1,000 students, and about 370 districts have fewer than 2,000 students.

Thomas Ash, a lobbyist for the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, said that just consolidating school administration won't save much. The real savings come, he said, only when entire buildings are closed.

Stressing the difficulty of closing schools, Ash said, ''Residents of Ohio don't leave their varsity jackets at home.''

The bill has been assigned to Wolpert's Local Government Committee, and he plans to start hearings this week.

jsiegel@dispatch.com

Lawmakers cited an Indiana proposal to cut townships and merge school districts.



IT SEEMS OUR OHIO GENERAL ASSEMBLY IS FINALLY GETTING IT. THIS SYSTEM OF PAYING FOR TWO LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IS PLAIN WASTEFUL AND INEFFICIENT.


By Double taxed

Does this mean?

Does this mean we can finally get rid of that leech township called Violet???

Dip in the road

What will Sauer and Fix do and to whom will they now give away the city treasury?